The Right Opinion – April 24th, 2012

– Wow, what a night in Alberta. The PC’S got an overwhelming majority, defying the pollsters who had the Wildrose Party in either minority or majority territory. Will anybody ever believe them again? I won’t. There’s an old saying, “loose lips, sink ships”… well that’s what happened. A couple of comments from a few Wildrose candidates blew the election. The calls of bigotry stuck and Wildrose lost. Plus, the media jumped at every opportunity to strike Wildrose and the weak-minded bought it. That and people who never voted anything but PC in their entire adult lifetimes were too afraid to embrace change.

I have some advice for Wildrose leader Danielle Smith. Next election tell your candidates to shut the f!#k up. To the people who think Wildrose supporters are ‘rednecks’ and ‘bigots’, you really have no idea what you’re talking about.

– In Cornwall, city council approved e-bikes on the bike path. They did restrict the use of the bikes in some areas, but I won’t get into it because it’s laughable. You can read the whole story here.

Not a bike.

The approval is a trial period for one year. Much like the trial period for dog walking, city council couldn’t make up their mind. They are more interested in trial balloons than making definitive decisions. Congrats to Andre Rivette and new Councillor Gerry Samson for voting against motorcycles on the bike path.

When someone gets run down by one of these 180 pound motorized vehicles plus the overweight rider, the blame will be on the heads of city council.

By the way, e-bikes are banned on Calgary’s extensive bike path system because e-bikes are motorized vehicles.

– Now that city council has apologized to Councillor Andre Rivette for having his integrity called into question, maybe it’s time to get serious at city hall. I keep expecting Rip Taylor and Jaye P. Morgan to jump up to bang a gong.

– Yesterday I rode into Calgary from Strathmore. It was a beautiful day with the temperature hitting a record high of just over 25 degrees. It was great day to ride, but the wind damn near killed me. I rode 40 kms straight into a 30-40 mile an hour wind. The ride to the Northwest through Calgary wasn’t much better. 72 kms overall, but I’ll check the wind direction and intensity before I do that again.

But few expected Mr. McGuinty’s Liberals, who promised in last fall’s election not to raise taxes, to move so quickly on that front. And there is little sense they satisfied all their own concerns – let alone those outside government – before pressing forward.

Some of those concerns, including about the dangers of overcomplicating the income-tax system, are purely practical. There has not been time to take a comprehensive look at how much tax “leakage,” caused by high-income earners having added incentive to find ways around the system, would put a dent in the $470-million in projected revenues.Nor has there been much analysis of whether the extra hit – which by some calculations would actually add 3.12 per cent to the highest tax rate, because it would be applied before an existing surtax – could be enough to drive some rich Ontarians out of the province altogether.

“No chancellor can justify a tax rate that collects next to nothing,” Mr. Osborne told the BBC. “It’s as simple as that.”

He called the previous Labour government’s “bash the rich” experiment a failure, a triumph of spin over substance. He said people with taxable incomes of more than £150,000 produced essentially the same tax revenue with a marginal tax rate of 40 per cent as they produced with a marginal rate of 50 per cent.

Ontario’s Liberal Premier, Dalton McGuinty, might want to reflect on the British experience as he ponders NDP Leader Andrea Horwath’s offer to swap New Democrat votes for a higher marginal tax rate for Ontarians with taxable incomes greater than $500,000.

* The big name warmers are jumping ship.

It was fascinating to hear the guffaws during the CBC debate when Wildrose leader Danielle Smith suggested the science isn’t settled on “climate change”. The sheer ignorance, no, stupidity of these people astounds me. All of the predictions of the warmers are falling apart. Ice is growing in the Arctic, Polar Bears are thriving, penguins in Antarctica are procreating at an astounding rate, glaciers aren’t disappearing and sea level isn’t over running coastlines. It goes on and on.

Now we read one of the biggest warmers of them all is recanting. James Lovelock seems to be a skeptic. Good for Mr. Lovelock for coming clean.